I tried using rename to clean up file names but my expression outgrew the command line (not to mention the difficulty of escaping everything). I ended up hacking /usr/bin/rename.

Here it is, for what it's worth:

#!/usr/bin/perl -s
# bsb hacked version of /usr/bin/rename
use strict;
use vars qw($q $n $t);
use Convert::Translit;
# Quiet, do Nothing, Test
$q=$q; $n=$n; $t=$t;
my $trans = Convert::Translit->new('Latin1' => 'ascii');

if ($t) {
    $n=1;
    @ARGV = <DATA>;
}
if (!@ARGV) {
    print "reading filenames from STDIN\n" unless $q;
    @ARGV = <STDIN>;
    chop(@ARGV);
}


for (@ARGV) {
    my $was = $_;

    $_ = $trans->transliterate($_);
    $_=lc;
    s/&/ and /g;
    s/\+/ plus /g;
    s/'//g;
    y/()~/---/s;
    print if $t;
    s/(?:(\.)|(-)|[\W_])+/$1||$2||'_'/ge;
    s/^[._-]//;
    s/[._-]$//;

    die $@ if $@;
    if( $was eq $_ )        { }     # ignore quietly
    elsif( -e $_ )      { warn  "$was not renamed: $_ already exists\n
+"; }
    elsif($n || rename($was,$_)) { print "$was renamed as $_\n" unless
+ $q; }
    else            { warn  "Can't rename $was $_: $!\n"; }
}
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Brad